Opinion: Why we're having a Twitter house clean

We can't hear your thoughts among all the noise

Some people get Twitter and some don't. Here at PC Advisor, we love it.

The PC Advisor Twitter feed is a great way for us to engage with our readers. In our 140-character tweets, we discuss the latest PC news and post links to cool tech articles (whether on PCAdvisor.co.uk or elsewhere on the web). But most importantly, Twitter allows us to see what our readers are thinking, respond to their thoughts and retweet the most insightful ones to a wider audience. It's the messages addressed to @PCAdvisor that we really like - the chat and instant feedback we get from tech fans around the world.

The problem is that, by following more and more people for a variety of reasons (in our very early days on Twitter, for instance, we adopted the then-common policy of politely following back anyone who followed us), we've reached the point where we're trying to listen to too many voices at once. And that means the chances of us catching what you say are slim.

When we check our Twitter feed, all of the tweets displayed are from the previous couple of minutes. Some of them are incredibly pertinent, but many are just general chatter, inspirational quotes, links to non-tech-related articles and even comments in languages that we can't understand. (PC Advisor has a healthy overseas readership.)

So here's our plan. We're going to unfollow a large number of people on Twitter. We're going to do it carefully and manually, so we can check how relevant the tweets are (not to us personally, of course, but to PC Advisor) before clicking unfollow. It may be that what you say is interesting, witty and intelligent, and we still unfollow you - because it's simply not technology-related.

By doing this, we hope to increase our chances of spotting the tweets that are most relevant to PC Advisor's audiences, then retweeting or replying to them. Which will make our own feed even more valuable and relevant to the people who follow it. After all, we assume they're following @PCAdvisor because they love reading about PCs and technology.

If we do unfollow you, and you're disgruntled, let us know if you think it's out of order. A quick message to @PCAdvisor usually gets our attention. Equally, if there's someone writing perceptive, PC-relevant comments on Twitter and you think we should be following them, let us know in the same way.

Remember that the @PCAdvisor address will continue to act as an instant mailbox for our readers to get in touch with the PC Advisor team - we read every message directly addressed to us in Twitter.